


mind over matter (is magic)

by cosmichorrour



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, Angst with a Happy Ending, Denial of Feelings, Drinking, Eating Disorders, Friends With Benefits, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Esteem Issues, Slow Burn, Smoking, Strangers to Lovers, Substance Abuse, Therapy, former ballet dancer atsumu yessir, sakuatsu is endgame i promise atsumu just has sex with various others before then, this is a fic about healing!!!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:28:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29208891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmichorrour/pseuds/cosmichorrour
Summary: It could be a new beginning. You’ll miss your parents, and the summer songs of the cicadas—but you could dance a different kind of dance, this time. For the whole world to see.(Or: There is a person beneath Atsumu’s slender lines. A living, breathing creature between the tape-measured waists and the corseted silhouettes. He just hasn’t realized it.)
Relationships: Miya Atsumu & Miya Osamu, Miya Atsumu/Oikawa Tooru, Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi, Miya Atsumu/Ushijima Wakatoshi
Comments: 24
Kudos: 66





	1. a prologue without disambiguation

**Author's Note:**

> hello sakuatsu nation!!! some nebulous night months ago, i had the idea of writing a very specific model au that caters to my very specific tastes (and not a lighthearted one, since that's not how i operate). i'm no model and have no expertise on how modeling works, but i've heard about the dark underbelly of the industry here and there, so i wanted to tackle the herculean task and write a model au with some weight to it! so after hours of research and conceptualizing, and hours and hours of writing before rewriting and writing before rewriting all over again, i am here with this, the home-festered Brain Plague that's been dragging me by the hair for so! long! shar listened to me shout (wordless or otherwise, bless her) about this fic for over half a year, and now here it is! my dissertation on miya atsumu, or at least the beginnings of one. and she's long.
> 
> as a disclaimer, i write about many topics that can be triggering, so be sure to read the warnings once and twice and once more again. some are rather personal (like eds and substance abuse, along with the heavy feelings of inadequacy) so this fic is a means of catharsis for me, but it's about healing before anything else! and while it won't seem like so for half the story since atsumu's character is convinced that these problems aren't exactly that—problems—the fact that this is essentially recovery fic will not change. i touch on how the industry glamorizes destructive behavior and real issues some models deal with (smoking, substance use, warped self-esteem, harmful hookup culture) to give this fic some realism (with some dramatization of course, since this is fanfiction). i write from the lens of someone who initially finds no fault in those things or tries to ignore/dismiss them altogether, but genuine glamorization is 100% not intended. once again, this is a story about healing, and this fic takes lots of time to go through the process. i also made atsumu a former ballet dancer because... Yeah. i'm projecting.
> 
>  **SOME GENERAL CONTENT WARNINGS FOR WHAT'S TO COME:** eating disorders (both anorexia and bulimia, so by extension purging and body image are topics), recreational drug use/abuse (of many varieties), drinking, smoking, perfectionism and artistic obsession, self-deprecation, unhealthy habits in general, past injury recovery, mild depictions of panic attacks, therapy sessions, atsumu's denial of his problems, so much sex, and recovery! healing! both mentally and physically!
> 
> as this is just the prologue, there's nothing to warn for here! there will be specific content warnings provided for each chapter going forward, and i will update the tags accordingly as i post. i hope you guys enjoy!
> 
> title is from frank ocean's white ferrari

Decembers in the Cyclades are nothing like Decembers in New York. Here, raw frosted fingertips and foggy breaths are substituted for bare-footed walks along the shoreline and the murmur of rolling waves. Seagulls ride cool breezes over distant stretches of ocean, the horizon line hidden where the bright cerulean sky presses its body against the equally bright cerulean water. Cream linen and white lace fall from Atsumu’s shoulders, Dior and Jacquemus from the new season, staring down a lens that looks too heavy for any videographer to carry with two steady hands, his poise natural. Effortless.

It’s another monotonous day. His life is filled to the brim with monotony really, cycling through airport terminal mornings and strobe-lit runway evenings, hopping city to city, leaving nothing behind but afterimages in crowded streets, silhouettes in taxi cab windows, profiles on the face of billboards. But here, the sky is wide and open and the clouds a dream of milk froth. Somehow the entire world seems painted, the freckle of a sailboat in the distance like a goalpost to be reached. It makes him want to jump in for a swim, chase the contrail streaking the ether.

It's a shame he's currently occupied.

“I’m Atsumu Miya,” he says, smooth English in a voice that’s something like a tape-recording. He offers the camera a soft, deliberate smile, bleach-gold hair falling into his eyes tactfully, shocks of honey on the smear of skin. This is a lesson in captivation. “I’m from Japan.”

“Well, we’re obviously not in Japan, so where are we right now?”

He keeps his sentences short, easy. “In Santorini, Greece.”

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“We’re behind the scenes at a Vogue Italia shoot for the March Spring Fashion issue,” Atsumu recites like he’s reading off a cue card, the words illuminating in his head like the neon lit signs of Kabukichou, or a karaoke screen. The camera pans to landscape, a crystalline snapshot of a gas-fire blue world with powder-white architecture. Somewhere along the reel, a flashy montage will get edited in of Atsumu striking a pose. “I’ll be on the cover.”

“It’s a huge honor to do March covers. Are you excited?” he’s asked. It’s an empty question, like most are. For a split second, Atsumu considers scoffing or making some sort of snide comment. He wants to, always does, a voice goading him on in the back of his head. Behind-the-scenes videos are nothing if not a waste of time.

But he’s just a model. He’s not there to have a personality, or to have complaints—he’s there to look pretty.

And before anything else, he's there to please.

So instead, he gives them the easy expression they're looking for. The one he's learned from all those advertisements, makeup to fragrance to this next season's collection. Congenial is what he might call it. It's the kind of charm that always sells. Following an unwritten script, Atsumu turns his head just right for them to catch the ringlets of his lashes up close, the slope of his nose, the strategic upturn of a smirk. Dancing taught him how to be graceful, and more recently, modeling taught him how to carry himself as a living photograph. He’s got it down to an art.

There’s a pause. Half a heartbeat and a blink, not quite long enough to be hesitation, but not quite short enough to be unintentional either.

Atsumu answers, framed by the backdrop of an infinite ocean, the one who's end the camera can't reach, can't delineate, “Of course I am.”

But that’s just lip service.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and so it begins!
> 
> \- - -
> 
> if you would like to cheer me on or scream at me, feel free to do so on [twitter](https://twitter.com/FAIRSTRlFE)!


	2. bury me in margiela

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and to kickstart, here is an absolutely gargantuan first chapter (that was way more stressful than it was actually worth, let's be real). this is mostly me trying to establish atsumu's character and his environment for a whole 18k straight, but hopefully it's a fun and enjoyable read regardless. and a little painful too maybe. whoops. this is also where the black swan references tiptoe in before they burst through the door in full force, shouting.
> 
> s/o to shar for beta-ing and overall listening to me scream and cry about this thing for such monumental amounts of time, and to michelle for reading over some scenes for me! you guys are the best and i hope you walk in the light always!!
> 
> copious amounts of references are made to the movie black swan and the ballet swan lake. there is a reference to bts's dance video for their song black swan as well, and these things will continue to be motifs in this fic
> 
>  **CONTENT WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER:** eating disorders (both anorexia and bulimia), in-depth descriptions of the struggles with food, purging, recreational drug use (weed and cocaine), drinking, smoking, vague depictions of injury, implied panic attack, implied drunk sex, self-destructive tendencies, self-denial of one's mental health and wellbeing

Hidden away in the mirrored practice room is a corps de ballet of reflections, the shadows their audience, the glow of fluorescent bulbs their spotlight. There’s perspiration beading at temples and a comforting kind of soreness in outstretched limbs. The thrum of the music is steady. Familiar.

You do not dance quite like the ballerinas do. You do not dance quite like you were taught, either. You twirl with the underbelly of your toes instead of the torn satin of a pair of pointe shoes, and sometimes you trip into your glissades and travel in your pirouettes. But that's just inevitability. Mistakes come like they always do, and you find yourself wishing you were perfect like you always have, but you take a deep breath and straighten your back anyways. Then, in lockstep, in that slowed crawl of time, you bring your feet together. You count the music again. You fix yourself into position with the poise that’s been drilled into you a thousand times over—like winding yourself up, because this shoddy little practice room is your own personal universe, your own personal music box—and you dance.

(This is the entrée. You call it like it’s the beginning, but you’ve begun so many times it doesn’t count as your start anymore, repeating the same steps all over again like you’re on replay.)

You dance a duet with the mirrors. Your foot swipes through a tendu before you reach a leg behind you into an arabesque, canvas on vinyl, following through each movement, sous-sus to plié to relevé to plié again, silhouettes doing pirouettes behind you. You take a deep breath before you move into the effacé, and your foot rolls back up until you’re back in relevé again like striking a pose. Ballet is all about lines and shapes, so your limbs are structured and the taut ripcord of your back is straightened. You call this discipline.

(This is the adagio. It’s slow and deliberate in the way your words sometimes aren’t. But you don’t need to speak to get the emotions across, because you dance. You can dance.)

You strive for the perfect angles. The nodular joints—from your knees and your elbows, to your wrists and each of your knuckles—bend exactly how they need to. This is when you shine most. You dip into a penché with your same practiced grace, and it’s without any support, because in this part of the pas des deux, you are dancing alone, and you don’t need to pretend to be supported by your shadow.

_Strip it down. Make it visceral._

(This is the variation. You have only so much time to leave an impression, to leave a crowd breathless. Even on your own, it isn’t difficult when you’re beautiful, and that’s something you’ve trained yourself to be.)

You breathe with rhythmic, metrical exhales. Rond de jambe to arabesque to promenade to plié. You inhale with the music, going through each of the motions, just like you’ve done dozens of times before, flexible with your movements but adamant with your elegance. Tombé pas de bourrée to glissade into the flic jeté. The pirouette that follows is fast and tight, six seven eight revolutions in the span of a heartbeat. With careful, calculated steps, you leap into the rivoltade like you’re trying to soar. The music thrums, resonates to the bone. To the marrow. There’s a strain as you stretch your legs, outreaching, slicing through the air. It’s quick and it’s strong, and it’s everything you meant for it to be, but then comes—

(This is the coda, but instead of the stuff of dreams, it’s the stuff of nightmares. You are dancing for an audience of reflections and light refractions instead of real, moving eyes, and only the walls can hear the sound of your breathing. The worst thing about this performance is how it ends, quietly and anticlimactically, without a bow. A little swish in the water, a little gust in the air. Brisk and meager and forgotten, because to dance without spectators is to dance without substantiality.)

A _pop _.__

__It’s no louder than the music, but to you, in your own personal universe, it’s the deafening whip of gunfire. You tumble into the landing—palms, knees, thigh all against the floor—and you feel it. The way something turns, twists, tears in your leg. The wordless shout that comes is almost as sharp as the pain, and with how the back of your calf hurts, and how your knee aches like nothing you’ve ever felt before, you begin to wonder if you really did get shot._ _

__And that’s how it ends. With you, with your white-knuckled hands and your strained feet, alone with your reflection, your shadow’s soft edges casted at the point of contact between your flesh and the vinyl, chafed and raw and stinging._ _

__Nobody hears you. Nobody hears the music either._ _

__(This is your swan song. They say a dancer dies twice—once, when they stop dancing, and again, when they stop breathing._ _

__You begin to understand what that means when you make it to the hospital. Tears run until they’re dry on your face, and the streaks redraw themselves when you see the bruises, the purpled skin of your legs. You’ll get surgery and walk just fine again within the coming months, but the knobs of your knees just can’t bear the strain of a fouetté anymore, and you’ll learn that time does not, in fact, heal all wounds, and that birds can’t fly with clipped wings.)_ _

✧

“It’s the way you walk,” is what an intern says to Atsumu at a Nylon Japan shoot. The intern, Hinata Something from Something Cosmetology School, has marmalade hair and a teenage naivety that’s stuck to him like chewed gum beneath a desk, still clinging onto his too-bright adolescence with his too-short fingers the same way he grips a contour brush, cleaning up his mistakes with a cotton swab and makeup remover that stings against Atsumu’s waterline. There’s something a little clumsy about the way he scrambles to shade match Atsumu’s face, wrists in knots and fingers in ribbons—performance anxiety, or something like being tongue-tied maybe because he always seems like he’s tripping over his words, new language on his tongue he can’t quite shape his mouth around. Or maybe he’s just always in a rush; that’s a trend with those around their age. Atsumu isn’t sure, but the awe he gapes at Atsumu with never wavers.

It’s the way he walks. Hinata doesn’t go into specifics, just points and calls and states a vague thing like it’s a plane in the sky, answers “Dunno, it just is” when Atsumu asks about the hows and the whats and the in which ways, wonders what exactly people see in him that they don’t see in others. Experience perhaps, or the natural way he carries himself maybe, but he knows it’s in the way he walks. That’s what Hinata says. That’s what others say too.

“I guess,” he answers with a shrug. Something isn’t quite right with him today, discomfort a rolling undercurrent beneath his persisting exhaustion, but that livewire personality of Hinata’s remedies it, just a bit, even if he has no interest in being flattered. Atsumu’s only used to compliments from certain people, and bright-eyed young interns are not among them. “My walk isn’t _that_ great.”

“But it is!” Hinata protests with way too much enthusiasm. Atsumu’s sure he can see spotlights beaming from behind Hinata’s eyes, except this isn’t the catwalk. “Something about it. Your arms, your hips, the way you _move_ —”

Atsumu scoffs. “I used to be a dancer.”

Hinata lights right up, a Times Square billboard in the flesh. “Oh, that explains it. I can see that.” He nods to himself like all the pieces have fallen together in his head, gets up close—way too close to Atsumu, who’s face he gawks at like he’s looking at each pore one by one. “You’ve got the...sway.”

“The sway,” Atsumu parrots, glancing to Hinata’s furrowed brow at his right and looking immediately away to his left.

“The sway!”

Again, but Atsumu still isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean. He figures it’s better not to ask.

Hinata hums to himself as he takes a step back to admire his finished work—tightlined white liner, white mascara, white eyebrows. It’s something very editorial-esque. Atsumu looks like he’s blinking with cotton for lashes. “You know who else has an amazing walk? Sakusa-san.”

“Sakusa Kiyoomi?” Hinata nods in affirmation. Atsumu glances downward when Hinata shakes a bottle of setting spray and spritzes it all over his face. There’s an unpleasant, acidic taste in his mouth that lingers. “You’re right, he does. I’ve seen him in passing at shows.”

“He’s crazy cool.” Atsumu almost brings a hand to his mouth to stifle a laugh, but he’s always had good foresight. Hinata would pout, and he doesn’t really want to see that, so he keeps it to himself.

 _Cool_.

It can mean anything, but Atsumu doesn’t think it’s the sort of word to describe someone as intense as Sakusa. Then again, Hinata’s simplistic like that. “And have you heard? He’s the new face of Gucci.”

Atsumu turns to face him, incredulous. The white blobs of his eyelashes frame the edges of his peripherals, but the orange rind of Hinata’s hair is a noticeable splotch of color through them anyway. “‘Course I have.”

“Gotta keep an eye out for competition, right?”

“I don’t care about things like that,” Atsumu answers, no hesitation. He rolls his saliva around in his mouth and still tastes the food he threw up earlier: a full breakfast he ate with some photographer at some high-ticket restaurant in Roppongi. Just thinking about the meal makes him want to lurch—the batter, the powdered sugar, the soft-boiled egg. He didn’t have to pay for it, sure, but he still feels gross.

Really gross.

But that’s just an afterthought.

“Liar.” Hinata giggles, gives him a knowing grin. “You’re always eyeing other models like you’re plotting a grand scheme for their downfall. Or like you just wanna plain sock ‘em in the face.”

“I’m not a villain from a movie.” Atsumu waves him off with a dismissive hand. “And this is the first time you’ve met me in person.”

“And that’s the first impression I’ve gotten.” Hinata starts sorting through his tools, stuffing them haphazardly into their arbitrary places in the organizer. The contour palette he used kicks up colored dust into the air when he closes it with too much force. It freckles the vanity light. “You’re more friendly than Sakusa-san, though. I’ll admit that. You at least talk when I do your makeup.”

“You did his makeup?”

“Mhm, sure did. Some of it, at least.”

“I haven't even met him properly yet.” Atsumu is colored a bit impressed. “You get around more than I expected.”

“But you know what’s annoying? They barely even let me touch that face of his. Can you believe it? Me. Hinata Shouyou. One of the best from my class.” And this is when the pout comes out in full force. “They told me I’m lucky I can even do a look for you for a shoot. Brutal, isn’t it?”

Atsumu responds with poorly-veiled disinterest, “Sounds frustrating, Shouyou-kun.”

Hinata is not perceptive enough to notice. “It sure is, but at least I got to work with Sakusa-san.” His expression melts away into that smile of his again. He notices a smear he missed beneath Atsumu’s lower lashes, so he takes another cue tip with makeup remover to Atsumu’s under-eye. “He’s real intimidating, but his walk is beautiful. Seriously.”

“It is,” Atsumu agrees, can’t really help agreeing. There are sometimes things you have to admit, and the beauty of Sakusa Kiyoomi’s walk is one of the given, more of a fact than an opinion. He moves to grab a water bottle from his bag the moment Hinata backs away to grab something from his kit. “I’ve seen it plenty in video.”

“I wonder where he learned how,” Hinata says in mild wonder. Atsumu uncaps, swallows the lump in his throat, and drinks just for the sake of consuming something. To wash away what lingers in his mouth.

Half a bottle down, knuckles wet from the overflow of too-quick sips, Atsumu states, “Some people are just born with it.”

“I think you’re one of those people too,” says Hinata, and this time around, it’s a matter of opinion and not fact. A lack of understanding. “You really stick out from the other models too, ya know. Like you’ve been doing this your whole life.”

Atsumu blinks.

He hasn’t. He was dancing for most of it.

“Sure feels like I have,” Atsumu says then, as the apprehension kicks in again, mental images flitting through his mind in a reel. High school, dance practice, his torn ACL. Osamu beside him in the hospital. The way he stumbled around campus at their graduation, tender-footed. The day he submitted photos to his agency for the first time. The heady rush of relief when he was signed, when he felt like he could still do something with himself again.

And then there’s the dizzying feeling of nausea, of feeling sick. The sharp pain when he stands up too quickly. The old, crushing weight of _failure, failure, failure—you’re never gonna dance again_. Those stick especially well. He can’t scrape them off, even with fingernails to chisel.

This walk of his—it is not something he was born with. It was something he grew into, and something he later had to earn back.

There’s a laugh, sounding all disembodied. Atsumu’s mind is not so much on Hinata anymore, or anything around him, or himself in this moment for that matter. When he speaks again, it’s not an answer to anything or aimed at anyone in particular. He states it. A simple matter of fact tossed into the noise, smothered by the click of camera shutters and the spritzes of spray bottles, muttered. “Modeling. I’ve been doing it for a long time now.”

Hinata answers like it was addressed to him anyway, keeps talking, fashioning words out of thin air. That’s his thing, his tendency, in the same way absence mid-conversation is Atsumu’s. So when he says with his default childlike wonder in his eyes, “You’ve been at this longer than Sakusa-san, right? I wonder how he manages to land such big jobs so consistently,” Atsumu reels over each syllable.

He traces back over the words again. It takes him a moment—Sakusa, front covers, consistently booked jobs. There are safe assumptions for him to make now because there are safe assumptions for him to make about _all_ models, but he doesn’t know a thing about Sakusa. Maybe he’s not like the rest of them. Or like Atsumu.

Maybe.

His mouth is still too heavy on the side of acidic. So, instead of saying anything to quell Hinata’s curiosity, he just asks, “Shouyou-kun, do you have mints on ya by any chance?”

✧

Atsumu finds himself doing battement tendus against a wall wherever he goes. Even now, a few revolutions around the sun later, he still has some of his old flexibility. His knee has that slow-burning ache to it when he stretches a few centimeters too far, sure, but the rhythm’s been stitched into him like ribbons onto pointe shoes, and the counts run through his head like the inculcated steps are the only things he’s ever known, so he keeps at it. And keeps at it. And keeps at it until he can feel that bit of normalcy again.

The push-pull of his schedule finds him back at another casting, another tedious thing he’s put through in another city. It’s Paris today, like it often is, where he’s been a hundred times over in his twenties and once in his teens, clutching a ticket to the Bastille Opera House with clammy fingers, humming Tchaikovsky cadenzas to himself before the first act and running through routines in his head during curtain call, counts and all.

But he’s not in Paris now to be an onlooker. He’s not here to clap, and he’s not here to twirl between crossfades for a theater production either. He’s here to audition. To be chosen. To swap out wide-eyed fixation for pretty poses, edges and angles all perfect in a viewfinder. To be the one fixated on, albeit not on the stage he initially hoped for. But he’ll live.

It isn’t always this grandiose, glitzy thing, being a model. Castings are the dullest of the dull. The room he arrives at isn’t so much as a speck in the face of one of their typical venues. He’s walked churches and concert halls and art exhibitions the size of entire museum floors, with all the strobe lights and all the velvet ropes. Here is just a space with a white ceiling and off-white walls, a place with a whiteboard scrawled in haphazard writing and a tack board full of photos, but here is where things begin.

He has his phone in one hand as he’s doing dégagés, opened up on Instagram as he checks the numbers of his recent posts. The street photo of him in Paris got more likes than he thought it would, and the comments are flooded with things from _omg you’re so pretty_ to _bro i fuck with the outfit heavy_ to _how do you sleep at night knowing ur that hot_. Drivel, really, but those are the things he should want to read, the things his agent wants to see. A minute is all he needs before he switches apps to gloss over his direct messages, before he switches again to open his new emails, before he switches once more to his Twitter account, before he switches for the last time to his unread texts—the most recent of which is from Osamu. Of course. Always Osamu.

[FROM: _samu samu_ ]

[9:34] morning  
[9:34] have ya eaten yet

[TO: _samu samu_ ]

yeah [9:43]

[FROM: _samu samu_ ]

[9:43] don’t lie to me tsumu

[TO: _samu samu_ ]

… [9:44]  
why the fuck are u asking if that’s how u respond [9:44]  
fine no i didn’t [9:44]  
didn’t feel like it [9:46]

[FROM: _samu samu_ ]

[9:47] well you should even if you don’t

Atsumu sighs. It takes nothing now for him to get irritated. Leaning his back against the wall, his fingers go through the motions without a thought and type in record speed something he’s said to Osamu a thousand times before.

[TO: _samu samu_ ]

it ain’t really ur business samu [9:47]

[FROM: _samu samu_ ]

[9:48] i think my twin brother’s health is absolutely my business  
[9:48] i’m just worried about you

Another sigh. This type of conversation is routine for them, copy-pasted down to the exact word choice, and is always just as much of a pain as it’s ever been. Atsumu doesn’t have the energy to argue back and forth, never does anymore.

[TO: _samu samu_ ]

yeah [9:49]  
i know [9:49]

Atsumu turns off his phone altogether, tucking it in his back pocket. There’s no reason for him to keep reading the same, tired lecture and doing the same, tired dance—following the same routine, reading the same texts, listening to the same phone call—just on a different day at a different time. He has things to do, people to charm. Atsumu wedges a fingernail between his teeth and bites down to occupy himself instead. He could really go for a cigarette.

When he steps past the threshold of the building, makes his presence known, he never waits for long. The directors know his name and his posture and the way he walks, which is the greatest benefit of being an industry veteran—less effort, less time wasted. He’s years past his days back in the model apartments, dishing out all his pocket money to catch a cab to the next gig, spending an hour in a line that wraps around the block.

A woman with lipstick on her teeth approaches him with a grin, overly friendly, and he quickly moves to shake her hand out of platitude. “You’re here, Atsumu.”

He does not know her name. Atsumu has crossed paths with far too many people for him to learn all the names of, but they recognize him wherever he goes, pretend they’ve always known him like old-town friends. “Yes ma’am.” There’s some vapid eye contact before she walks him further inside the room, passing by all the others—new blood with hopes of becoming the next face of some large fashion house, the Guccis and Diors and the Louis Vuittons—still forced to wait in the ridiculously long queue. He feels sorry almost, but he’s short on time. “Good to see you.”

Atsumu’s turn almost comes as he watches a model get scowled at by the casting director, who’s a short older man he’s never met with a scraggly beard, years of age overhanging his face. He also has a tendency to project, as it seems, because he says something along the lines of, “You need to lose weight in your hips,” in a heavy French accent.

It takes everything in Atsumu not to glare.

If they were to get into semantics, technically speaking, he doesn’t need to do anything. That model—he could scowl and walk right out and not a soul in the room would blame him for it. Some people do that. Some people let their anger best them before they’re a blip on the radar, never given another chance to trip on their steps into another casting, trip on their words over another question, fumble their comp cards like they’ve never handed another person an object before. This is a game of tolerance, before anything else.

After all, your face is a resume, your height is a qualification, your waistline is a specification. You’ll hear it parroted from those who don’t even fit the requirements. Atsumu’s stomach turns.

This is the _real_ reason Atsumu dislikes castings. The model before him passes by with his head lowered from shame. Others are gawking. A staff member—another woman with glasses too large to sit right on her nose bridge—shakes her head out of disapproval. At the director or the kid, Atsumu isn’t sure. It’s all up to her own empathy, if she managed to salvage any with this sort of work.

Atsumu makes his way to the center of the room with long strides, his steps straight like he’s a walking latitude line cutting through the planetary body of the room. He weaponizes his best smile, remembering just one thing in time: surname goes second. That’s how they do things here. “I’m Atsumu Miya. Represented by Wilhemina. Nice to meet ya.”

“Oh, _Atsumu_ ,” the director repeats with recognition. The emphasis makes it sound patronizing, almost. “One of Japan’s high demand models, now aren’t you? You’re quite the big name nowadays.”.

“Yeah.” Atsumu gives him a mock-friendly laugh, on the side of too light, but it works all the same. “That’s me.”

The director furrows his brows. He gives Atsumu an up-and-down glance before he makes it back to his face, like a collector inspecting an art piece for blemishes of inauthenticity. His expression relaxes, and Atsumu seems to have made it past the preliminaries. “You’re even more striking in person.”

It sounds fucking obnoxious coming from someone like him, but of course Atsumu doesn’t say that. “Thank you. Glad you think so.”

“I like your look. How tall are you?” he’s asked. Typical casting call questions. Your face is a resume, your height is a qualification, your waistline is a requirement. Atsumu promptly passes the casting director his comp card, a pretty collage of photos and statistics where his name isn’t nearly as important as the circumference of his hips or the vertical of his body.

“A meter eighty-seven,” he says with brevity. He brushes a hand through his hair and moves to stand in front of the white backdrop, practiced elegance in his plain clothes. Everything follows a formula—they take a new photo of his face, they watch him walk, they pull out the tape measure to make sure every centimeter comes with cold, sobering truth. Models are made to fit clothes; clothes are not made to fit models.

And that’s just how it goes.

A camera is pointed at him, routinely, in the way cameras usually are. Atsumu pays no mind to the onlooking staff and assumes a hardened expression. Like rehearsed. A rigid stare and a sharp jaw, half-lidded eyes and slightly parted lips, limbs loose and shoulders relaxed. He’s good at this; he’s done it thousands of times before. On stages and under spotlights, moving or unmoving. Dancing or not.

Right now, Atsumu is a blank slate, but he’s nothing if not memorable.

The casting director beams at him. Atsumu swallows down the lump in his throat. “Perfect.”

✧

Being a mannequin of Atsumu’s pedigree comes with a sense of dignity. It’s murmured in the perfect posture and the careful strut down the catwalk, the sharp turns and the straight set of spines. People know who you are. Designers know your name, publicists know your every move, photographers know the lines of your body and the contours of your face like the backs of their hands.

But here, right now, at this several thousand meter altitude, Atsumu is naked of all the poise and composure, bent over the counter of Ushijima’s shiny new private jet. He’s facing a window and looking out to see an inverted sky, winded.

There’s also the way he’s flushed with heat, from his face to his chest to his navel, among other things.

“ _Mmh_ , Toshi-kun—” Atsumu calls out in the moment he manages to catch his breath, chest heaving. His legs quiver with Ushihima’s next thrust, skin sticking to the marble counter. “Y-You know there’s a bed, right?”

“Of course I do. It’s my jet,” Ushijima answers, and Atsumu hates how stony and serious he sounds, even now. Then, he says, punctuated by a rough thrust that knocks the air right out of Atsumu’s lungs, “And don’t call me that.” Ushijima’s hips grind especially forceful against the pink, blushing swell of Atsumu’s ass. The whine Atsumu was trying to hold back in his throat escapes, and it’s so much louder and so much filthier than he thought he could sound.

“ _Okay_ , I—I won’t,” Atsumu says through gritted teeth, all exasperated and fucked out. He’s scrambling to adjust his weight to support himself, but his wrists are bound together by Ushijima’s silk Versace tie, and he finds himself slipping until Ushijima pulls out almost completely and thrusts back inside to the hilt. It sends Atsumu jerking forward, and the slide is so smooth and wet and _good _, fills him in all the right ways, he chokes on air. “ _Fuck_ , your dick is so goddamn _big_ , shi—”__

“It’s Wakatoshi,” Ushijima corrects, sounding more like an order than a simple clarification, cutting through the sound of Atsumu’s whimpering. His hands are large and sturdy on Atsumu’s hips, holding him still and gripping hard enough to leave crescent marks along the lines of his navel. “Say it to me sweetly." 

There’s a particularly hard thrust, rutting up right against Atsumu’s prostate. His mind melts, pleasure running so intoxicatingly through his body he’s sobbing around his syllables, repeating like a mantra, “Waka—Waktatoshi. Wakatoshi, _Wakatoshi_ , Wa—” 

Ushijima gives him a satisfied hum, low and content, and reaches over to press fingers to his mouth. Atsumu parts his lips and sucks on them without hesitation, little moans in his throat as he wraps his tongue around each digit, letting them reach further. Ushijima’s pace steadily quickens and Atsumu finds himself falling short behind the rhythm, struggling to fuck his ass back in time with Ushijima’s thrusts. The slap of skin when he meets Ushijima’s hips falls into rhythm with the moaning and grunting. 

“T-Touch me,” Atsumu says, breathless around Ushijima’s fingers, words coming out all wet and slurred. His dick slaps his stomach when Ushijima fucks into him hard enough his whole body goes slack. The jolt that runs through his body makes it back to his cock, has him sobbing. He shudders, all heat and all electric, and _fuck_ , he’s so close. “W-Wanna cum. Wanna cum so bad.” 

Atsumu’s fingernails dig into his palms when he balls his fists, teeth biting down on his lower lip hard enough to bleed, but Atsumu knows he can’t let himself break skin, not when he has jobs to book and photos to take. His words are mixtures of _oh oh oh_ and _fuck fuck fuck_ , incoherent combinations of random syllables amongst stutters and whines. Ushijima’s hand moves from Atsumu’s mouth to wrap around his cock, drooling precum from the neglect. Atsumu keens at the tight wet heat when Ushijima twists his wrists on the upstroke, that familiar warmth building in a coil at the base of his stomach. 

“I’m close, I think ’m gonna—” Atsumu doesn’t even finish his sentence before his body tenses in a taut arch, spilling on Ushijima’s fingers, who’s stroking him to damn near oversensitivity. He convulses, limbs going slack, mouth going dry. His orgasm hums, courses through his veins, and Ushijima fucks him through it with long, deep strokes. 

Atsumu’s body goes limp, struggling to catch a break, prostate rubbed against over and over until he’s keening at the overstimulation. Ushijima’s thrust grow shallow, and it doesn’t take much longer for Ushijima to follow with a short and concise “ _fuck_ ” before he cums inside Atsumu with a grunt, hips flush against the flesh of Atsumu’s ass, red and tender from hand prints. Atsumu lets out a little whimper, high and strung out and satisfied at the feeling of being filled. He pants through a few exhales in finality. 

Ushijima pulls out and Atsumu clenches down on nothing, hole fluttering with a sloppy mixture of cum and lube dripping down the sides of his thighs. He pays no attention to the sweatiness of his skin, or the tender ache that comes before the forming of new bruises. At the foreground of his thoughts, however, is the heady feeling of the post-orgasm glow. 

“That was the best, Toshi-kun.” Atsumu stands up, sore in all the pleasant places. The nickname is back in full force, but Ushijima doesn’t make any further comments about it. Atsumu says, half as a joke, half as a serious suggestion, “How ‘bout next time you fuck me on a bed of money on your yacht or something?” 

Ushijma, being Ushijima, responds with his signature monotonous drone and the most vacant expression humanly possible, “Sounds like a lot of paper cuts.” 

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Atsumu laughs, and then winks. “You know pain turns me on.” 

Ushijima looks at him for a long few seconds. “You’re insufferable sometimes.” 

“I wouldn’t be Miya fuckin’ Atsumu, fresh new face of Dior, if I wasn’t, now would I?” Atsumu looks at Ushijima half-lidded, a smirk playing at the corners of his lips. He laments now especially that there isn’t a cigarette held between his teeth. Post-sex smoke sessions are a different type of pleasure altogether. “Nice, respectable people don’t book huge campaigns like that without a little bit of dick sucking.” 

Ushijima gives him a look, ever-pointed. Quietly scrutinizing. “You always say things like that.” 

“Because they’re true.” 

Ushijima’s silence only proves him right. 

Instead of responding, Ushijima collects the clothing that’s been tossed to the side on a chair. Atsumu runs a hand through sweat-slicked hair as he follows Ushijima to the shower down the cabin, something he gawked incredulously at when he first flew with him between bookings in his other huge jet, before Atsumu realized how much money he really had (“Dude, what the fuck,” he had said, jaw slackened in shock. “How rich do you have to be to afford _this_ shit?”). Ushijima turns the water on, and they don’t even have to let it run for it to warm. Money buys little things like this too. 

Atsumu steps under first and sighs as the perspiration sticking to his skin washes away. “Toshi-kun, I heard you’re familiar with Sakusa Kiyoomi.” 

“Yeah, I know him. We’re...friends,” Ushijima replies, with a stutter of hesitation. Atsumu quirks a brow at him but doesn’t comment on it. “I’ve done a bunch of covers with him. We ran into each other a lot.” 

“Oh?” Atsumu reaches for a pump of soap and slicks up his arms and chest. “I guess everyone’s met him but me.” 

“That’s because you’re too occupied with everyone _but_ other models,” Ushijima says as he lathers shampoo through his scalp, reaching for a pump from the soap dispenser before doing the same for Atsumu. 

“What? Is that a bad thing?” Atsumu asks, and the mock-playfulness doesn’t leave his voice. He presses his palms flat against Ushijima’s chest, leans closer into Ushijima’s space until their noses almost graze. “Are you jealous? Do you not get enough of my attention?” He steps back. “Don’t tell me you’re in _love_ with me or something, Toshi-kun.” 

Ushijima makes this vague sort of expression, teetering on the edge of a scowl, but not quite. He’s the modeling world’s poster boy of stoicism, after all. Even Atsumu can’t read him well. “Of course not.” 

Atsumu breaks out into laughter. “Wow, no hesitation. My feelings are almost hurt.” 

“I just don’t want to see you burn yourself out.” There it is, Ushijima’s concern. It’s never less odd to hear, even after the hundredth time. 

Atsumu hums in the back of his throat. He really dislikes being worried about, whether it be his friends or Osamu or his own mother. And honestly, Atsumu doesn’t want to hear someone who just wasted several hours having sex with him on a plane—running the risk of the poor flight attendant walking in when they’re just trying to do their job—worrying about him _burning out_ of all things. Not when they both have the same exact job description. 

He’s far from it, actually. Atsumu, being Atsumu, is always down for _more_. 

So he changes the topic, and more is exactly what he asks for. 

“We still have a couple hours,” he starts, and then he’s pressing his chest against the wall, warmth rolling off his back, bending over just right so Ushijma sees the way he stretches his hole for display with both hands in an open invitation. All the foam and froth washes away and nothing’s left behind besides smooth, water-slicked skin. There’s the steady hum of muffled jet engines that smothers away the rasp of Atsumu’s breathing, but he still catches the sound of the sharp inhale Ushijima takes. “Wanna go again?” 

Ushijima’s thumb presses its way inside of Atsumu’s hole, down to the knuckle, strong fingers gripping his ass hard enough to leave a new handprint, his other hand working to stroke his cock back to hardness. Atsumu’s rim flutters around the intrusion as Ushijima pushes his way back inside. The slide is so easy Atsumu doesn’t even flinch. 

“Oh, and introduce me to Sakusa sometime.” 

It takes Ushijima no time to fuck that thought right out of Atsumu’s mind. 

✧

Everyone crosses paths in New York City.

Chance encounters in a huge metropolis are fickle things of either fluke or inevitability. It depends on who you are and where you frequent, sure, and there are times where Atsumu passes by the same construction workers during each walk to the station, and there are homebodies who never leave the safe spaces of their stuffy, overpriced apartments—but everyone crosses paths in New York City. At some point, at some time, on some avenue to their different destinations. They intersect.

Chance encounters in the modeling industry aren’t really _chance_. The probability of running into the same person twice during the same season is estimated at about ninety percent. The probability of running into the same people at some sordid afterparty in some lavish nightclub is a certain one-hundred percent with no decimals or rounded zeroes. That’s how it is when you’re in a big, glorified clique. Castings, fittings, shows are all filled with recognizable faces, so the probability of Atsumu running into another model he’s never been in the same room with before, someone in the same agency and prolific enough to grace four covers—from Vogue to Elle to Harper’s Bazaar, twice—in the last season, is something just barely short of impossible.

As it turns out, Ushijima doesn’t need to make any introductions, because Sakusa falls right into Atsumu’s lap like a wish granted by falling stars or other fantastical things of that variety. A Celine casting is not too high on his list of _Places He’ll Find a Person Who’s More of a Mythological Creature Than a Human Being_ because castings are their own special kind of mundane, but that’s how it ends up being. A drawing out of the hat of cosmic chance. A spin on the celestial wheel of fortune. It isn’t an unwelcome surprise, no. It’s Sakusa.

Atsumu recognizes him easily, standing a few bodies ahead like a living, breathing marble fucking statue. There are three points, three traits that indicate it _must_ be him: the mop of black hair, the ridiculous proportions, and when he turns around for a brief moment to glance at the people behind him in line, the pair of beauty marks above his eyebrow like accents. Punctuation. A bridge that connects the end of something to the beginning of another.

Atsumu looks at them, and then his gaze tilts downward to his eyes, large and dark and almost doll-like, and there isn’t a thought he could think that’s more definitive than, _Yeah, that’s Sakusa alright_. Besides a thought that’s something along the lines of this, maybe: Sakusa looks strangely perfect.

“Kiyoomi Sakusa,” he says, when his turn eventually comes, short and fast like he can’t stand to be there any longer. The staff sing him praises in hushed whispers as he steps forward to pass his comp card over. “I’m represented by Wilhemina.”

Atsumu can’t remember how many castings he’s attended in the past week. The names and the faces have all blurred together by now, and Atsumu finds himself dragging along from one city to the next. The clock on his phone counts thirty-two hours since he last slept, freshly arrived from a shoot with some snooty photographer on the other side of Paris, his entire career's worth of exhaustion in tow, passing a line that wraps around the block, twice. Usually, he’d forget about everyone in this room. Or better yet, he’d forget that he was ever there to begin with.

But Atsumu knows he’ll remember this casting in particular, especially after watching Sakusa strike the most simple pose in the book and making it feel like something new. Different.

With a few camera shutters and a handshake, it takes Sakusa half the time to say all the same words and go through all the same motions as everyone else. He crosses the room with about five long strides and his chin held high, swift and fast in the way Atsumu would be when crossing the distance of a practice room or thr spotlit sunstrip of a catwalk. Sakusa’s steps are quiet like he is, true to form, like he’s learned to turn his own body’s volume down. Move in muted motions. The complete opposite to the weight of his presence in the room.

He doesn’t turn to look at Atsumu, or anybody in line for that matter. The kids in front are too occupied with rehearsing responses to themselves like they’re preparing for a regular job interview, or scrolling through their Instagram feeds with that uniform look of vague disinterest in their eyes. Atsumu’s gaze still follows him though, has been following him ever since he first stepped into Atsumu’s line of vision, but maybe he’s watching a bit too intently, because there’s—

A heartbeat, and somehow Sakusa’s exit doesn’t seem to come as quickly as it should.

This is a thing that happens in movies, Atsumu notes. Many movies, where everything begins to reel at half the time it should, at fourth of the time it should, at eighth of the time it should.

This is a thing of chance. Slow-motion. Smoke signals of light and fire.

And it’s right there, right in front of him. There are many things Atsumu has obtained for himself—international recognition for a variation, a Gundam figurine that’s taller and cooler than the one in Aran’s childhood bedroom, his rehabilitated ability to walk—but now, he just wants something simple. Something easy. Something like Sakusa’s attention.

Atsumu makes the proclamation, tender curiosity, “I’ll see ya at the show.”

Sakusa pauses. His eyes do a sweep over each of the faces in line, one face to the next to the one right after, before they land on Atsumu. Sakusa’s expression is as neutral as it could possibly be, stuck on default. He does not seem like a person to care about much, or like the type to entertain everyone who approaches him with overexcited glee. But his mouth skews into something, half a smile maybe, and he answers with certainty like he knows he’ll make the cut, knows Atsumu will too, “Yeah, see you there.”

(Later, when Atsumu’s turn comes, he’ll scan the spread of headshots tacked onto the wall and eye the empty space where his will eventually go. He notices Sakusa’s among them, along with his name, his agency, and today’s date. A messy scrawl of four slash one slash one nine.

Maybe it’s time to buy some lottery, but Atsumu doesn’t need anything like luck. His definition of chance is a little different.)

✧

There is onigiri in Atsumu’s fridge, neatly arranged into tupperware and wrapped in the clear membrane of clingfilm. How long it’s been in there is an unsure, indecipherable measure of time, but Atsumu knows one thing: it could only be the work of one person, and of course it’s Osamu.

In hindsight, Atsumu regrets giving Osamu the passcode to his apartment. He regrets telling Osamu a lot of things—his schedules, his address, his new phone number—but ever since Osamu moved to New York, there is always food in Atsumu’s fridge, reminders on sticky notes left above the ice dispenser. It’s like he’s a growing child that still needs to be constantly fed, like he’s not capable of doing so on his own.

Atsumu, before anything else, hates being coddled.

The note left this time around, messy black scrawl on pale blue paper, says this:

_Made you something again since your fridge is always so empty. Container’s on the second shelf, you know the one. Don’t skip your meals._

Atsumu has two trash cans in his kitchen. One, the steel variety with the sensors, out in the open beside the end of the counter. The other, small and pushed to the very back, in the cabinet beneath the sink.

The latter is where Atsumu dumps the onigiri, in a place Osamu will likely never see. He isn’t here often enough to know, and has enough respect for Atsumu to not upturn his whole apartment. There’s nothing here for Osamu to look for, always vacant. Never seeming lived-in.

But truthfully, it’s Atsumu who doesn’t need to see it. It’s nobody else’s hindthought in the way that it’s his. He’s the one that doesn’t need to look at it, doesn’t need to ponder about it. And above everything else, he doesn’t need to be reminded of the person he is. Or to second-guess himself, because that’s when he gets himself caught.

Out of sight, out of mind after all. He feels less guilty that way.

✧

Atsumu has these dreams, sometimes. Snapshot reels of memories like he’s sifting through old photographs, unravelling rolls of aged film. Some of them are unpleasant, dreaded images of the past, sprained ankles and tear-streaked cheeks and sullen pushes off the ground on a swing set. Others are filled to the brim with joy and color, cotton candy mouths and feet jumping shallow puddles beneath rainbows. This one is caught somewhere in between.

The de novo warmth of April greets him back in his hometown, like it did years ago, tripping into his first days of high school with a few new awkward inches to his limbs and an extra count of textbooks weighing on his back. There are things that are different from this little capsule of time, now that he’s twenty-three with a whole different life altogether, but there are things that never changed. His fingernail biting, his habit of scratching at patches of skin until they’re raw, and Osamu—complete in this timeline with opposite-parted hair and a neater uniform than Atsumu—who’s to his left with a duffle bag of their ballet practice clothes, like always, because he’s the greatest constant of Atsumu’s world.

Osamu’s feet are much heavier when he walks than when he dances. His subtlety strips off along with his canvas slippers like he can’t bother to maintain his dancer’s grace after hours. In this dream, his steps are even louder than usual. The rubbers of his soles scrape the asphalt of the road, only a few dozen meters from the entrance of the train station. Atsumu hears the moment Osamu stops in his tracks, under the shade of a cherry blossom tree where the unfurled arms of its branches fall barely short from reaching the powerlines. Atsumu turns over his shoulder, a brief glance, and Osamu is there meditatively still, lips pressed into a line.

“Hey, Tsumu,” Osamu says, in the same way he does when he starts many of his sentences. “Do ya ever find yourself thinking you don’t wanna do this anymore?”

A turn of Atsumu’s toe, piqué onto his left foot, and they’re facing. The charms strung on his backpack’s zipper rattle, sing like bells. No-Face in semi-translucent acrylic, Luffy from One Piece in glossy enamel, a keyblade in polished gunmetal. Among them is the omamori from Meiji shrine, a little hanging spell of good luck for their performances. Their mother bought them during their first weekend trip to Tokyo in grade school. Now they’re stained from age, edges newly frayed with each passing year. Osamu has one to match. They’re both golden-stitched and blue.

A pause. Atsumu lets it drag the length of multiple counts of music because that’s how he’s learned to measure time. “Do what?”

“ _This_ ,” Osamu emphasizes. There's a gesture at something vague, a five-fingered expression with both his arms. At first glance, it doesn’t mean anything, but Atsumu knows Osamu like the back of his hand. They did things together, felt things together. He knows. He knows it like he knows many things. That old scowl in frustration, a precise reflection of Atsumu's own face. That low hang of shoulders, a wiry mould of Atsumu’s own body. That defeated groan smothered by the volume of the studio speakers, a tape recording of Atsumu’s own voice.

“This?” Atsumu asks anyway.

“This,” Osamu echoes. The shape of his hands are meant to show the shape of everything. Only Atsumu can tell. Abstract yet concrete, to him at least. “Spending forty-five minutes just to make it to the studio, pulling muscles, getting scolded by the instructor. It’s getting old, Tsumu. Aran and Suna hang out on their own these days, and I always feel like I’m missing out. I don’t wanna miss out, and I’m sure you don’t want to either, and I’m starting to think this just isn’t—”

“Worth it?” Atsumu finishes, because he knows. He always knew. They’re born from the same cell and raised with the same nurture, after all, with the same kind hands that walked them to the studio for the first time when they were six and snot-nosed. Crossing the same liminal spaces to reach the same destinations.

But now?

 _Now_ —

The leaves ruffle, an applause of sorts, as if moments like these need any fanfare.

Something is still left unsaid. But Osamu doesn’t need to say it out loud; neither of them do. It’s been long implied in Osamu’s recent indifference, found in the subtext of his pettered enthusiasm. Words hang thick and heavy in the air, pollen-speckled. Osamu’s brows stitch into an expression that looks hurt almost, apologetic in a way Atsumu has never seen before this point, but immediately decides he hates. It’s not the pretty, delicate thing he would want to see in a dream. Or at all.

 _This_. This is what their first fight was about, what Atsumu saw coming but got angry at anyway.

It was obvious, smack-dab in front of him with harsh red underlining. The disinterest, the distracted steps off beat, the hours spent practicing that seemed more like chorework to Osamu than anything meant to be artistic. They’re brothers, twins, they do everything together. But now, where it shimmers for Atsumu, it’s dim for Osamu. This is where they diverge.

“Yeah. Sorry, Tsumu. Really. I know it’s important to you, and it’s important to me too, but—” Osamu stops like he’s at loss of what to say. Stuttering is not something unbecoming of teenage boys, and the Atsumu of today once used to stumble over words like they’re concrete blocks on a cracked sidewalk too, but right now it’s spring again. The first one of high school. They’ll learn to speak in smooth syllables and what it’s like to outgrow the familiar blanket of their adolescence, and they’ll never quite be the same people they were today, or yesterday, or the yesterday before today’s yesterday. This is a new type of beginning, and all things that begin are also prone to change, including Osamu’s words, including his sentiments, including his goals. He’ll forget his teenage stutter, and he won’t dance anymore.

Atsumu sighs, not quite loud enough for Osamu to hear, because he knows what comes. He knows like he knows many things, but he still braces himself for it, has to. “I just don’t wanna do this anymore.”

It stings less the second time around.

Instead of shouting, or letting the heat rise to his face with ire, or showing his old bitterness when this first played out, years ago in the spring, the first one of high school, he answers, “Yeah, I get it Samu. I get it.”

And he does. Really.

✧

New York Fashion Week is never less panic-stricken of an experience no matter how many times Atsumu lives through it. His eleventh is just as frantic as his first, consisting mostly of hurried, pervasive hands and the accidental brush of setting powder into eye sockets. There’s the distant sound of someone choking on the taste of hairspray, the noise of scrambling interns running from one side of the venue to the other, the uproar of playing memory matching games with the clothing racks and tripping over clambering feet. The press and bloggers shove through the crowd, cameras gripped tightly, trying to catch interviews, photos—anything they can put out and paint as something new and glamorous behind some photoshop adjustments and sweet, deliberate words.

Backstage at Tom Ford finds publicists weaving in between models and staff like rats in a maze. Atsumu watches them comfortably from his seat. He glances to his left and the hair stylist wielding the blow dryer is replaced with a makeup artist armed with a kabuki brush, powdering him a fresh new layer of skin. There’s cameras pointed at him every which way, gripped with steady hands. They go relatively unnoticed until the flash goes off.

These are typical things. Persisting things. Brushes-behind-ears and microphones-against-lips things.

Now, backstage at Tom Ford finds Atsumu here, at the threshold of a public restroom with an armful of his belongings—his cellphone, his wallet, his earbuds, his portable charger, and his little pouch of toiletries.

Thin, white digits of his phone’s clock tells him there’s fourteen minutes before rehearsals begin.

Atsumu, in true Atsumu fashion, rushes inside with long but quick strides. Other models are in there rolling joints over a sink and gawking at their reflections in the mirror. Practicing their facial expressions, picking apart their own flaws, or deeply lamenting getting wasted the night before—it’s hard to tell. But more often than not, it’s a permutation of all three.

Like clockwork, Atsumu finds home in a stall in the back corner. He latches the door shut, in routine, before he hangs his bag onto a hook, gets on his knees like he’s about to pray, and goes about his usual ritual. There’s the sensation of the two fingers between his lips, pressing at the back of his throat, and the first lurch. A familiar movement. Everything he’s eaten today—which doesn’t amount to much at all, never does—is emptied into the basin of the toilet, the plop of the water permeating beneath the sound of Atsumu’s gagging.

This is normal.

Another lurch, before another, and another.

This the one thing the press never sensationalizes.

Atsumu is normal.

This is nothing for him to be ashamed about. He’s a model in a venue bathroom, echo chambers of secrets no one talks about, but do not have to be spoken out loud for them to be known. He’s a model. He struts catwalks. He’s doing runway model things, engaging in runway model activities, participating in runway model past-times.

But here’s the thing—seldom is he alone in doing so. There’s someone in the stall opposite of him, crouched to the tile just as he is, doing the exact same song and dance.

Everything about this is normal. Ordinary.

Throwing up is just a bodily function. Vomiting is just utility. A mechanism. An exercise in pain tolerance. A means to the objective, and to Atsumu, it’s something that all ends justify.

It takes him approximately two and a half of his remaining twelve minutes to finish purging. He flushes with finality and walks out feeling lighter again, phone chiming with a new text. He’s down to nine.

[FROM: _samu samu_ ]

[7:21] didn’t know if you were home but i stopped by  
[7:21] i left you more onigiri in the fridge

It’s another one of those messages Atsumu doesn’t want to receive. There are fifty-fifty odds he will respond to a text at any given time. Eating isn’t something he wants to think about at the moment, and the guilt-inducing combined subjects of food and Osamu make it even worse, so Osamu is promptly ignored.

Atsumu makes his way to the sinks with swift steps. The marble is blotted with ash and white powder and water splatter, room filled with the smell of burning. But hey, at least everyone is pretty. They make this seem regular, and they don’t pay Atsumu any attention.

Toothbrushes are a strange thing to see in most public restrooms. Atsumu knows this but he pulls one out anyway, the sort he pockets from his stays at hotels, and as one would do with such devices, he starts brushing his teeth.

Atsumu’s meticulous about it. He’s meticulous about a lot of odd things, going well over the suggested two minutes, cheap mint and fluoride scrubbing his mouth until the lingering taste of bile is gone altogether. He spits into the drain of the sink and turns the tap before running his mouth underneath the faucet, careful not to smear any makeup. He has six minutes.

Atsumu catches sight of a person in the mirror as he wipes away the water on his chin, emerging from a back stall. _That_ back stall.

An assumption was long made that it was another model, another monstrous shadow that’ll strut the same runway as he will. He assumed right.

It’s a given to know who’s selected to open and close shows. It’s also given to recognize industry veterans like Oikawa Tooru when they make grand appearances in mundane places like stuffy public restrooms. Then again, Atsumu is here in the very same space with him, and the industry likes to call him a bigshot too.

The glance Oikawa takes in his direction leaves as soon as it comes. Atsumu watches as he pulls out a bottle of Listerine from the pocket of his suit jacket and proceeds to rinse. For a long minute, Atsumu watches someone break up their weed with sticky, unsteady fingers, because it doesn’t feel right to stare at Oikawa right now. Atsumu listens when he pours himself another shot of mouthwash into the bottle’s cap, rinses once more, and proceeds to wash his mouth out underneath the sink too.

Oikawa meets Atsumu’s gaze in the reflection of the mirror once he finishes as Atsumu’s fixing the part of his hair. He says, matter-of-factly like he’s reading off a news headline, “Your teeth sure are perfect.”

It is not news, but Atsumu is swift with it. “Yours are too.”

Oikawa’s voice is so, so mild, but there’s a singsong to it. A tune. “Oh, they’re veneers.”

“Well, they’re really nice.”

“Thanks.” There isn’t a wrinkle in his smile. It’s one that’s a lot like Atsumu’s, easy to wear and easy to hate. “You’re opening the show right?”

“Yeah,” Atsumu responds, but doesn’t ask Oikawa if he’s closing in return. It’s a given. He doesn’t need to. He doesn’t pretend to care either.

“Good luck.”

“Likewise,” is what Atsumu says in acknowledgement. He pulls out his phone and checks the time. There’s two minutes left before he has to assume his position at the front of the queue, so he fishes the Tic Tacs out of his pocket, swallows a small handful so his mouth can taste the way he feels, all gross and artificial, and makes a stride for the door.

Before he leaves, Oikawa tells him, something that sounds more like promise than an empty platitude, “I’ll see you around.”

Atsumu gives him a nonchalant wave. Everyone crosses paths in New York City, so he knows that’s a given too.

✧

Intention is the framework of all things. Whether it be the presence of, or the lack of, or the degree of—no action is an action without it. It’s how you fake your way through job interviews, cheat on college exams, absolve yourself of crimes, and for Atsumu—it’s how he navigates his way through this world.

He means well about half of the time, approximated.

When he decides to drop off the onigiri Osamu left for him at Akaashi’s, and by extension at Bokuto’s, in a tote bag hanging from the dipping bend of his elbow—his intentions are good. Like they are about half of the time. Only ever that often.

Akaashi isn’t there. He’s somewhere in the city with his hands full at a late shoot, gripping a multi-thousand dollar camera and adjusting searing light fixtures onto some unassuming new model. Bokuto tells him Tribeca, on White Street, but Atsumu knows from frequent experience that those details don’t clarify a damn thing.

Instead of listening to Akaashi wax poetic about concepts for future shoots, or the intricacies of creating the right lighting, Atsumu gets to watch Bokuto scarf down boxes of takeout. And not just any takeout, but the kind that comes in the thank you bags with the smiley faces, the American bastardization of Chinese food from one of those restaurants in Flushing with at least three health code violations. Perhaps he’d rather watch Akaashi fiddle with camera settings and light angles for hours on end, but Bokuto is the only available company, so Bokuto is what Atsumu gets.

“It always tastes better if the restaurant’s failed a few inspections,” is how Bokuto rationalizes his decision when Atsumu points it out, spinning his fork into the pile of egg noodles. It looks slick with oil and the golden glow of fried food. Atsumu avoids looking at it to keep himself from gagging.

“You’re probably better off eatin’ the onigiri I brought,” Atsumu suggests, gesturing to the other side of the counter. They sit there nicely, unassumingly. “Ya know, since you’re supposed to be a fitness model and all that.”

Bokuto shrugs, carefree. “Nah, I’ll save them for Akaashi. He always says he misses Japanese food.”

“Guess that’s fair.” Atsumu turns away as Bokuto goes in for another mouthful. It’s getting a bit unbearable. “Nobody’s forcing you.”

“Why didya stop by anyways?” Bokuto takes another bite of chicken over the box container, standing in the center of the kitchen. His plastic fork is coated with shimmery sauce. Like the lid of the container is, and the puddle of chicken and veggies and noodles are. Like the corners of his mouth too.

Atsumu feels it, the food guilt somehow. It isn’t his meal, and it isn’t going into his stomach, but after looking at it, contemplating it, watching it being swallowed, it’s—

“Just to drop by some onigiri.” Atsumu is being truthful. Honest. The next time he isn’t. “Samu made way too many. I’m kinda sick of eating them.”

Bokuto glances at him with a raise to his brow, not out of skepticism, no. He isn’t that sort of person. Genuine wonder, friendly concern. Oblivious is what he is, but it isn’t his fault. Nobody really knows. “I know you just finished up with a show, so you haven’t had the time to eat right?”

This is the question Atsumu wants to be asked the least. Or at least, one of them.

Bokuto raises the styrofoam box, its base held with the plastic bag and sauce packets and all. He holds it in Atsumu’s direction, an offer, and perhaps the question this time around is the one Atsumu dreads most of all. “You want some?”

But here’s the thing—Bokuto intends well. He always does, no animosity under the blanket of his words nor malice under the bed. With enthusiasm.

And Atsumu—he doesn’t deserve well-intending people like Bokuto, or Akaashi, or the barista from his favorite coffee shop who prepares him a large americano every visit instead of the regular he pays for.

Or Osamu.

“No, I’m fine. Ate earlier already, but thanks.”

“Okay. Sounds good,” Bokuto says, and he’s back to eating again. Watching it is more unpleasant this time, and it gets more so as the seconds pass. It’s almost all gone now, the food—folded away into a body. Folded away to be digested, to be nourishment.

Atsumu doesn’t understand how he does it. How he lets himself walk into a restaurant, overlook all the oil and the grease and the grime and still place his order anyway. And then he remembers, because he’s made a thousand visits before—there are prepped meals in the fridge. There are fancy pressed juices Atsumu accepts sometimes when he’s offered and full, balanced meals. Thought-out, nutritional food that’s meant to be healthy. And for some reason, Bokuto still opts for takeout.

But that isn’t Atsumu’s business. It isn’t for him to comment on or question. He shouldn’t even be contemplating it. Bokuto’s personal choices don’t affect him, and he knows that.

And Atsumu—even if he wonders, even if he understands—still doesn’t want to eat. With or without Bokuto’s influence. Healthy food or not.

But strangely enough, nonsensically enough, even when he knows he shouldn’t—part of him wants to ask for the onigiri back.

Osamu made them after all, perfectly arranged into the scratched tupperware, the one Atsumu makes sure to score with a steel fork every time he returns it. That very container has sheltered so many different meals inside—yakisoba, fried mackerel with rice, those eggy soufflé pancakes that dip in shape with the weight of berries piled on top. Never with too much sugar, because Osamu has at least that much understanding for him.

And the onigiri in that very container, its lid scuffed and matte red—he wants them back.

It’s like this every time. He either tosses everything in the garbage with a wince or gives it to someone else under the guise of generosity, chest tight. The guilt never fails to twist in Atsumu’s stomach, and it shoves and kicks at him when he doesn’t immediately backtrack, immediately withdraw the offer, immediately catch the food before it reaches past the bagged rim of the trash.

But he can’t do that.

Whether it be shame or stubborn pride, or whether he even has a reason—how could he? How could he possibly? How can he ask for it back, and how can he salvage something already thrown away with resolved finality? Hell would freeze over thrice before Atsumu could ever let himself, not when he wouldn’t eat the meals when he still could, and not when he wouldn’t even dream of the action either.

Atsumu knows himself, and he knows he wouldn’t. This is just inevitability, but for some indistinct reason, the regret sits too heavy. Stirring, stirring, stirring like a storm. Like he has something to lament.

“Hey, Bokuto-kun,” Atsumu speaks, levels quieter than usual. He adjusts the strap of the tote until it’s secure in the fleshy dip of his shoulder, makes sure he has his keys and phone. “I think I’m gonna go. It was nice to see ya.”

“Later.” Bokuto waves. He’s all done with his food now, gathering his trash to toss away. “Oh, also,” he starts, and that sort of preface from Bokuto is only a positive thing about half of the time. But unlike Atsumu, his intentions—they’re always good. “It’s been a while since we’ve gone out together. Let’s go get sushi sometime, yeah? Akaashi found a really good place.”

Atsumu can’t find it in himself to decline. “Sure.”

✧

[FROM: _samu samu_ ]

[10:23] did you eat the onigiri  
[10:23] i learned to make them recently. suna really likes them

[TO: _samu samu_ ]

yeah i did [11:17]

[FROM: _samu samu_ ]

[11:20] i’m glad

✧

The photographers sometimes call New York City a ghost town, supersized. Not quite the kind you see in movies with the barren streets and the skipping roll of tumbleweeds, or the kind with dilapidated, plant-overgrown houses and wood decay. It’s a large, spacious thing with buildings that stand adamant in the glow of the somnolent sun, shining glass obelisks like the straight set of Atsumu’s shoulders when he walks, the tower in his spine. There are no shortages of businessmen clutching briefcases and train handholds with a phone pressed cheek to shoulder, or bicycle delivery drivers with insulated backpacks, or tourists with too much luggage waving down cabs for the quickest ride to their hotel. New York always has people, always will have people, on every corner of every block. Upstream and downstream, undulating.

From Atsumu’s window, he can see the snaking python of traffic down below, the changing freckles of stoplights, the slow crawl of figures on the sidewalk like a march of ants. It’s a far cry from being absent of people, and nothing if not _dense_ , but there’s something strangely empty about a city as populated as this one, and sometimes it feels like nobody lives here at all.

 _They say New York is a melting pot. People from all cultures, of all varieties. But nobody’s ever really present, you know? I’d walk down the block and have nothing to take shots of but cement and the half-translucent silhouette of someone who isn’t there anymore, or multiple someones, ‘cause everyone’s always in a goddamn rush_ , is what a photographer told him between shutters during a Moschino campaign shoot. He had a propensity for the eccentric. He was also pretentious as fuck. _Like it’s a place where only ghosts stay._

He wasn’t wrong, in hindsight. Atsumu’s apartment is the very reflection of that. It’s deep and wide and the marble countertop of his kitchen island is polished to diamond-shine. His lights are adjustable and bright like palm-sized suns, and the window wall gives him one of the best views money could buy—and money can buy all, anything he could ever want—but it’s still vacant, this place of his. This place he’s meant to reside in, where he comes and goes and comes and goes all over again. Always so devoid of _things_.

To be fair, Atsumu doesn’t have many belongings here nor much attachment to this place. When he drops by, his time is spent sleeping or showering or grabbing new changes of clothes in between bookings. He lives on planes more than he lives in what’s meant to be his home, but it’s still worlds better than his old model apartment, the one he had to share with five others back when he first got signed. He’d rather this place feel uninhabited than it be the size of a dorm room trying to house six boys with brittle wrists and massive dreams, so Atsumu doesn’t find an issue with it. Not really.

On average, his apartment spends about eight hours out of the day occupied by one person. It spends zero occupied by two, save when Osamu visits sometimes, so today is a bit of an anomaly.

Oikawa is over, sitting in Atsumu’s lap, hole stretched around his cock and hands clutching at his shoulders, and the usual unsettling quiet is filled with wet, wanton moaning.

They’re both a bit tipsy, fresh out of the afterparty and Manhattan nightlife. Atsumu found no point in booking a hotel when his place was only a few blocks away, so they played drunk hopscotch on the sidewalk and made it all the way back here, in the dimness of Atsumu’s room, their clothes tossed haphazardly onto the ground next to the bed.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Oikawa pants into Atsumu’s mouth. His irises are blown wide and glassy, and he’s grinding down against Atsumu’s cock like he’s chasing a high, always chasing. Atsumu adjusts the placement of his hands until they’re gripping at the sides of Oikawa’s thighs, helping him move, supporting him as he slides all the way up to the tip of Atsumu’s cock and drops back down again.

And it’s not like Oikawa needs Atsumu’s help. He’s _damn_ good at riding dick. That much is obvious by the expert curve of his back, the way he moves to hold his weight behind him with both arms, the flex of his thighs. Atsumu sits back against the headboard and his entire view is the smooth plane of Oikawa’s skin, the taut muscle of his stomach, the red flush of his chest to his ears.

Oikawa’s noisy when he’s getting fucked. It’s as if he’s trying to put on a show, little whimpers of _oh_ and _ah_ and _mm_ as he works Atsumu’s cock deeper. Fingernails meet the flesh of his hips when Atsumu holds him in place to fuck up into him, thighs quivering and entire body tensing when his prostate is rubbed against just right. Atsumu reaches out to grab Oikawa’s cock, pumping him off to a messy rhythm, drawing tight little circles over the head. He keens, rim all pink and swollen, sliding along the length of Atsumu’s dick with a stutter to his movements. “Atsu—I-I’m close. Mmh, I’m so fucking close.”

“Me too,” is all Atsumu says, too concentrated on the slick of Oikawa’s rim along the line of his dick, wet and stretched. The hand jerking Oikawa off moves to snake behind his neck instead, pulling him close again until he’s sitting upright and flush against Atsumu’s chest, and they’re kissing. Sloppy and obscene and without any tact at all.

Oikawa wraps fingers around his dick, attempting to time the loose strokes with each thrust until Atsumu fucks into him particularly deep. His hand goes slack altogether, pressing into his prostate just right when he does so. There’s a broken moan, almost a shout, and a hand gripping welts into Atsumu’s upper arm. Oikawa groans. Atsumu picks up the pace.

Sex is such a sticky affair, always is. But in moments like these, when he’s completely lost in the unrestrained want for more, Atsumu remembers just how hooked he is. His need, something instinctual and compulsory and not at all satiable.

But physical pleasure doesn’t mean much, in the grand scheme of things. Never really has.

Oikawa cums right then and there, full-body tensing, clenching and writhing and riding out his orgasm. It doesn’t take long before Atsumu finishes too with a stutter in his hips, all sweat-slicked skin and bated breaths shared between them.

They fall back onto the mattress. After a few minutes of sitting there still, Oikawa is the first to peel himself away. He lets out a sigh, satisfied. “That was better than expected.”

Atsumu reaches for the lighter and half-empty pack of Lucky Strikes on his nightstand. He offers one to Oikawa first, who takes it, before holding his own between his lips. “Did you expect the most god-awful sex in the world or somethin’?”

“Of course not,” Oikawa chimes, watches Atsumu nurse a flame behind the shield of his palm. He leans in to immolate the end of his cigarette in the fire too. Smoke gushes white and harsh between his lips. “My confidence in you was plenty high, but you outperformed.”

“Glad to hear it,” Atsumu says with a laugh. He stands to fetch a towel and wets half of it under the sink before tossing it to Oikawa, who catches it before moving to wipe away the perspiration and the sticky mix of cum still sticking to his stomach.

The silence stretches long. Atsumu washes his face and runs the shower, the door to the bathroom still wide open. Shame and modesty are things he outgrew years ago. By the time he steps underneath the water, peering through the glass and through the threshold of his bathroom, he notices that Oikawa is halfway finished putting his clothes back on. People like him—no, people like the both of them—are always in a hurry. _Always in a goddamn rush _.__

“I’d love to stay, Atsu-chan, but I’ve got some early-morning fittings, and you probably do too so...I’ll be off,” he announces, but it sounds more like, _I don’t really want to have another walk of shame before we inevitably leave for work tomorrow morning in awkward silence just to do this all over again later_. Or maybe Atsumu’s just that insufferable; he'd like to think the former.

But Atsumu gets it. He never lingers too long after his hook-ups either, leaves as swiftly as he comes like he has to catch the last train home. That’s how casual sex is meant to be—brief and disconnected and unattached. Distanced.

Oikawa’s shirt is wrinkled in all the wrong places and the lapel of his leather jacket isn’t sitting properly around his neck, but things like that don’t matter around people you don’t need to impress. He waves and gives Atsumu a cheeky “bye bye” as he slips on his shoes.

“See ya,” Atsumu manages before there’s the click of the doorknob turning. Oikawa flashes him a smile as he steps out from the front entrance. Before Atsumu blinks again, the number of occupants is back to one, and he’s once again alone with the shadows in his empty apartment, moonlight from the window streaming in soft.

✧

“It’s a polaroid camera,” is what Akaashi preemptively tells Atsumu after handing him a gift bag, stuffed with only a single sheet of tissue paper that leaves hardly any room left for him to play the guessing game. But Atsumu didn’t mind that at all—he doesn’t care for surprises anymore. Maybe Akaashi picked up on that. “It’s not much, and it’s a bit late, but happy birthday from both Bokuto and I.”

It’s February. Atsumu’s birthday was in October, but sentiments aren’t much different whether they’re belated or not, so now he’s sitting with his ankles crossed in a cab, a shrink-wrapped thing of ink and cardboard turning in his hands. Tentative curiosity.

Atsumu receives a lot of gifts. An abundance of them, really. Things from flower baskets and chocolates he often tosses immediately or clothes and jewelry he often gives away. And it isn’t because he doesn’t appreciate the value of those things, don’t get him wrong. He has no time to tend to flowers, he doesn’t do chocolate, and the clothes and the jewelry others think he’d like, more frequently than not, are just in poor taste.

He’s also a Miya Atsumu. The creative directors and the marketers like him enough to let him pick out the pieces he wants from whatever new collections they ask him to walk for and take photos in. He’s been showered with every typical material thing the average person could want but a car and a house. Atsumu doesn’t need gifts, but he’ll give Akaashi and Bokuto one thing—he’s never received a camera before.

He turns the box over in his hands to the back, reading the specs, some he vaguely understands and others he doesn’t. Chrome with tan leather, one-hundred sixteen millimeter lens, manual focus, among other things he’ll soon come to figure out. Atsumu decides he’ll wait until he’s home before he opens the packaging and fiddles with it, but as he spreads the bag open again to set the camera back inside, he notices something.

There’s a handwritten note tucked beneath the tissue and the sleeve of instant film Akaashi had the consideration to get for him too, ballpoint pen to cardstock. It reads:

_Hope you find someone you want to take pictures of! And I hope you can photograph them with the same awe as everyone else when they take pictures of you!_

✧

Marc Jacobs brings Sakusa, hair dark and eyes darker, with the same magnetism he had the first instance Atsumu saw him, this time without the sterile white backdrop of the casting room and the embellishment of plain clothes. One three slash two slash one nine. Now in February, in a more mild cold than before. The show is about to begin.

“Zombie man got your attention, huh?” Hoshiumi asks as he’s pressing new contours along the hollows of Atsumu’s cheek. As if it was necessary for him to look even more gaunt than he already was, Hoshiumi makes sure to do it with vigor.

Atsumu blinks. “Zombie man?”

“Sakusa over there,” Hoshiumi clarifies, to which Atsumu laughs. “He’s kinda scary.”

“He’s _pretty_ ,” Atsumu corrects, sneaking another look through his peripheral somewhere while Hoshiumi fills in his brows, wincing at Sakusa as if he were scoping him out, model scouting on the street, “like a doll.”

The way Hoshiumi blanches reminds Atsumu of a poorly acted scare from those nineties horror flicks. There’s ironity in that analogy, as it turns out, because Hoshiumi says, “Yeah, like the ones in scary movies or something. Dolls are creepy too.”

“Creepy? That’s kinda mean, Kourai-kun.” Atsumu closes his eyes to let Hoshiumi run brick red eyeshadow on his lids. It’ll probably take him three makeup wipes to get it off, and the stain left behind will linger even long after. By the next show, Atsumu will seem like he’s been rubbing his eyes for an hour straight, or like he’s had a good cry in the cab with the driver as his shrink. Atsumu tries for a closer look at Sakusa, but even with this distance, Atsumu can see his black eyeshadow, dark, blending right in with his irises. “He’s nice to look at and you know it.”

“Oh, I agree,” Hoshiumi says and pulls out a vial of loose glitter Atsumu knows he’ll have trouble scrubbing off, getting trapped in his inner corner and stuck to his eyelashes. Inconvenient and a bit painful, sure, but that’s your reality when you’re a coloring page of lineart, all black and white and full of negative space, made for someone else to fill in the gaps. “He just looks...over it. You know what I mean?” The focus never leaves the glint of Hoshiumi’s eyes, even as he talks. “Like he doesn’t really want to be here.”

Atsumu cracks a smile, wincing up at the vanity lights when he tries to blink away the powder that gets in his eye. “Do any of us really?”

By the time Hoshiumi shrugs, he’s finished touching up the makeup, scurrying to gather his brushes to move onto another model he’s waving over to the chair beside Atsumu. Sakusa is somewhere getting his hair spritzed down with hair spray for the last time, sitting a dozen meters away, one leg crossed over the other with picture perfect posture, gaze fixed somewhere in the unobservable distance, not looking at anything in particular.

And there’s plenty to look at here. It’s a Marc Jacobs show after all, one that’s running approximately thirty minutes late by now, still yet to start in the designer’s absence. It’s annoying, frankly, waiting on an artist who’s tardy to their own show, but Marc Jacobs is the type to find artistry in things like that. Keep the audience waiting not quite on the threshold of too long, but enough, and they’ll care. The more it takes to have you, the more they want you. It’s an easy principle.

Feeling dutiful on a rare day like today, Atsumu takes a glimpse of the model board for his number. He’ll be thirteenth, sandwiched somewhere in the middle with the rookies and those whose careers far outlived their shelf life, light completely petered out. He’s not sure how they’re still getting booked—old connections, probably, and other favors—but it’s up to the hands of inevitability like all things are. When they all come to an end eventually.

That’ll be him someday, years from now, only half the model he once was, his shadow on the runway only a hazy remnant of what used to overtake the entire catwalk. He won’t be booked just like how he won’t dance anymore. Involuntary resignation, whether he wishes for it or not.

But it’s fine. It’s fine because Atsumu’s face will be immortalized into wide, striking centerfolds, on front covers and web browser search results for all that remains of time. Or at least, all it’s able to be preserved for. Opening and closing shows for the likes of Dior and Gucci and Saint Laurent means your face gets plastered everywhere: fashion history textbooks and archives to poorly written articles reminiscing about old times and old innovators. They’ll probably omit his name somewhere to fit a description of the pieces and the collection instead, or forget it altogether, because after all, Miya Atsumu is not a human being. He is a prop for glass-protected displays and museum exhibits. Something decorative. Something inhuman.

And inhuman is what he’ll be. Atsumu’s look for the show is something that swallows his form all together. A large coat falls just above his ankles—black faux fur, grey-striped into zigzags, silvery tulle sitting around his shoulders like a bed of flowers. The collar of his chiffon undershirt reaches up his throat, red like his makeup, red like dahlias growing in the cracks of concrete, climbing climbing climbing, and Atsumu’s sure the intention was for him to look like he’s being engulfed. Like he isn’t a person but a piece of art.

That’s just the thing, isn’t it? When you’re a model, a mannequin—you lose your personhood.

But at least you become art.

“We need everyone lined up now! Marc is here! Show starts in five minutes!”

Feet don’t particularly feel like feet anymore in the weight of his show shoes. Atsumu scans the gaps between slender legs and chunky sneakers to get a look at the tape on the ground, a little treasure map of names to establish their places in the queue. He sees _Atsumu Miya_ in messy black scrawl and assumes his position behind an Australian kid with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass clean down the middle.

Sakusa is opening. This does not come as a surprise. He has the right look for oddball, campy brands like this one. A brooding figure juxtaposed against jewel tones and frills and lace, contorted shapes and crooked lines. Designers love their doll-like people in their doll-like clothes strolling through their doll-like installations. After all, fashion is just like playing house.

The concept for this collection is, as Marc Jacobs explained, something akin to fallen angels. Wearable couture, haunting dialogues between intimacy and distance and other combinations of profundity. Another bullshit narrative to tack on to yet another collection, another assembly line of stitched fabric on moving flesh hangers. Atsumu doesn’t have the slightest clue as to what the fuck any of that means. He never does.

But before anything else, it’s about the presentation. The showmanship. Upscale theatre, or something comparable to those old silent films from the nineteen-twenties with less plot and more color. Little emotion, no dialogue, just picture-perfect displays where the audience is left to fill in the blanks, to highlight and draw arrows in the margins pointing to the inspirations, to the bits of potential meaning. Here: is a reference to the lacquered glamor of the seventies, red-lipsticked teeth. There: is a reference to the sixties, the Jackie Kennedys and the Rosemary Woodhouses and the A-lined coats. More techno in some places, more old school in others. It’s best when the clothes do all the talking.

And talking is what the clothes do.

Fallen angel concepts find their poster boy today in Sakusa, who looks exactly that personified, less of the enigma he was before and more of a fucking menace. Now, there’s something eerie to him, to his face and his presence and all of his angles.

Off-the-wall or absurd are not the fitting words today. Classic and minimal aren’t either. The common tropes aren’t really there—but the look is dark, and it’s intimidating, and it takes itself too seriously. It fits Sakusa almost too well. The jacket, ruched and pillowy, ruffles around him like feathers, widens the plane of his back like wings, folded. The shirt, the only thing that isn’t black as pitch, is a hit of white with an over-exaggerated collar, buttoned up the throat, an oversized ribbon tied around this neck in a loose bow. Lace slacks and bulky suede loafers and it’s damnation couture. As if he just finished a trip down the stairway to heaven, navigating through the nebulous in-between before he reaches hell.

It’s dramatic, and it’s theatrical, and it’s everything the press could want.

Tulle grazes the shoulders of frantic staff as Sakusa walks by, a tenebrous blur of ink and gossamer, steps quick and nose pointing forward forward forward to the front of the line. Atsumu reaches out in time and catches him by the sleeve, fingers loose and mindful of the fabric. He knows if and when to let go because he knows better than to tarnish the garments minutes before the show begins, but he never does. Never has to. Sakusa’s feet come together and his back straightens, uniform.

Sakusa is not someone to sweet talk, but Atsumu’s eloquence, of course, is still ever exemplary. “Good luck out there.”

The line of Sakusa’s mouth skews just a bit, a corner raising just the slightly. Atsumu’s not sure if the self-serving part of his brain is supplementing him with details that aren’t there, because Sakusa says in a tone of voice that does not quite match the expression, “I don’t need anything like luck.”

That’s—

Unexpected.

“Show starts in three minutes!”

The time it takes for Atsumu to blink is twice the time it takes Sakusa. “Thanks though.” It sounds lighter this time. The smile might not just be a thing of Atsumu’s imagination. “Good luck to you too.”

Atsumu draws a blank. Everything he wanted to say is scrubbed away clean, no eraser marks left behind. What comes out instead is, “Appreciate it.”

It takes too long for Atsumu to think and he only manages that one platitude. Before he can say much else, Sakusa nods in acknowledgement and lets himself be led away by the forearm by some frustrated backstage manager shouting into his walkie-talkie. There’s just no time or space for them to have a conversation.

Still— _still_. Atsumu really wants to speak with him. Make some kind of stupid, vapid small talk if that’s what it whittles down to, but before the words begin to form in the lines of Atsumu’s mouth, a shout nestled uncomfortably in the back of his throat, one more thing before a sea of people split them too far apart, the bass of the music kicks in and all hope Atsumu had is thrown to the wind.

On top of looking like a menace, Sakusa walks like one too, long and powerful strides like he has a quota of a few kingdoms to split in two. Atsumu stands on the tips of his toes to see and doesn't bother worrying about creasing his shoes. Not when he gets to witness something like this in the flesh.

 _Walking with purpose_. Atsumu recalls being told that by Glenn, that pretentious asshole of an agent of his, over and over until it’s as ingrained in his mind as his own name. It rewrites itself in Atsumu’s mind as _dancing with purpose_ then after; there’s showmanship in both. Sakusa treats the catwalk like a stage. Atsumu will follow meters and meters behind later, but from his position behind the wings of the set, the position that gives him the glimpse of Sakusa’s first dozen steps, he watches in a stupor all the same.

Then, Atsumu remembers a particular word in the obnoxious explanation about the collection, the phrases carried from the castings all the way to the Vogue article that’ll be published after this whole affair is done with, cradled somewhere between paraphrases and quotation marks but still just as pungent as the first time Atsumu heard it. Even if he finds it to be nonsense, in the context of everything else.

 _Haunting_.

And Sakusa’s form—it’s right beside the dictionary definition.

Atsumu doesn’t need to see it to know, how Sakusa will turn at the end of the runway, perfect steps and easy movements, how it comes so natural there’s nothing practiced to it at all. Like he was born to pose in the same way Atsumu once believed he was born to dance.

Once. A long time ago. Atsumu somehow feels—

Envious.

He thinks he now understands what Akaashi meant with the note, about photographing someone with that slack-jawed feeling of amazement, the awe. It’s a shame—no, more of a crime really, that Atsumu didn’t have the foresight to bring his camera, because this is exactly what Akaashi was talking about.

This very thing right here. This is something he needs to capture, something that needs to be preserved forever. And that something—that fleeting image Atsumu can’t fully encompass in a three-by-three inch frame, can’t fully do justice, but he’s still inclined to try—is someone like Sakusa.

An angel, recently fallen, or a black swan like the one from the ballet, _that_ one, the one he used to dream the most colorful dreams about performing—Atsumu isn’t sure what to liken him with, or how to compartmentalize him.

But a single word comes to mind, just one thing that lingers in the back of the throat, the same as before: perfect.

✧

The end of a fashion week must be punctuated by one thing and one thing only: getting plastered enough to wake up the next day drunk. No clique in the world loves a party like fashion snobs do, and Atsumu, who inserted himself into their world, forces himself to love the parties too.

Atsumu makes his way to the afterparty immediately after the show in a carpool with five other models he doesn’t know the names of, all European with blue, blue eyes and tall nose bridges. They’re nice enough. All models are nice enough, really, if they want to keep getting jobs. One shows her admiration for him in between self-anecdotes, stories of how she snapped a heel during her first casting and how her matted hair was washed with water bottles over a trash bin fifteen minutes before the start of a show. Another sits on his phone in solemn, tranquil silence. The one immediately to his left is fast asleep.

He loses them the instant they make it inside the club. That’s how it usually plays out. When they pre-game in the car and walk a little crooked past the bouncers, nobody keeps track of anybody else.

The inside thrums with life and neon. Dizzying at first, always is, but it’s as familiar to Atsumu as photography studios are, or the haphazard rooms strewn with fabrics and threads, the ones where he always expects to get his ribs poked with needles, pieces sewn right onto him as if he were a lay figure.

Atsumu’s free from that now. He’s in a more comfortable change of clothes, no sharp pains in his sides nor tape-measures around his waist. The makeup on the show has not been washed off, no, because he didn’t have the time and Hoshiumi worked too hard to make it look just right. It also fits with the club’s ambience, he thinks. Matches the lights.

Kuroo is there, all broad and suave and wearing that signature almost-sneer of a smirk of his, because Kuroo is everywhere, piss drunk with some pretty boy with worn-in bleached hair hanging off his arm like he’s a life preserver. Tsukishima is in the opposite direction, still tall and platinum blond and disinterested, leaning against the corner of the bar that’s closest to the exit. Ushijima is nearby too. He especially looks out of place, but there’s a woman in a backless dress who’s cupping his ear to say something to him, diamonds the price of sports cars around her neck, and Atsumu can tell he’s doing his usual networking.

Post-show celebrations like these are a trophy case of pretty bitches like Atsumu, not always quite as perfect and pretty and clean as people like to think. A girl a few feet away snorts a bump off the keys to an Audi, something she doesn’t even fucking need here with the subway system, and Atsumu thinks, _They’re probably just for the coke._

Against the counter opposite of where the bartender mixes drinks with panicked proficiency, a boy in his teens, as it seems like, has a rolled Canadian bill and a credit card held between his thumb and his forefinger. Once again, Atsumu thinks, _They’re probably just for the coke._

Ordinary sights on an ordinary day.

Atsumu’s only three shots of tequila and a glass of patron deep into another typical night. He’s still on duty. Attending parties like these are written in the microscopic fine print of all modeling contracts. During this portion of the job, Atsumu needs to drink a bit more, hit a joint a few more times, reach his usual levels of fucked up. Quotas are not currently being met.

It takes him no time to mooch liquor off of someone. Though it’s vodka, which he hates, he still accepts the glass graciously. Other models are nice like that.

Silhouettes are all he can see in the center of the crowd, dark and nebulous bodies between luminous beams of strobe lights. The sips do not go down easy, burning along the line of his throat. His stomach does a backflip by the time he reaches a pleasant level of drunk, by the time his tipsiness is tipsy. He still needs to pace himself though, doesn’t forget. There’s a few hours left of this party to go.

Atsumu stands up a little straighter—or at least, to the best of his ability—and makes his way towards the bar, sitting himself down next to some expensive looking man in a sharp tailored suit. Atsumu has an endgame, because a fashion week afterparty needs one always. What was decided this time around is: find someone to make out with, and maybe get his dick sucked along the way. The unbuttoned shirt, the glassy eyes, and the sly smirk—he has three weapons, and they never fail to get the kill.

And that’s why Atsumu’s at the top of the leaderboard.

(Later, when he’s limping through the door of his apartment after almost throwing up in the elevator, he’ll drunkenly make his way to the bathroom and shove fingers down his esophagus like a machine in lockstep, purging himself of everything. Social events always have him eating and drinking gross things for appearances; Atsumu’s hellbent on flushing it all out as quickly as possible. Most of all, he needs to get that sugary piss-shit of a cocktail out of his system. The one he vaguely remembers the prestigious magazine editor—that one expensive looking man from the bar, he pieces together in his head—buying for Atsumu before giving him a sloppy blowjob in the back of the club.

When Atsumu starts to claw his makeup off, ripping it away as if he were peeling back his skin, red glitter and eyeshadow underneath his fingernails like dried blood, his reflection in the mirror is the only thing in the world he still finds truth in.

_Strip it down. Make it visceral._

Atsumu doesn’t forget to wash his face and brush the rot off his teeth. He’s a product that needs to sell, after all.)

✧

“I’m Atsumu Miya.” The syllables have some static to them, filtered by the audio equipment and washed out in the noise of the crowd. It’s another one of those backstage behind-the-scenes videos. Vogue films them too much and Atsumu’s been in too many, but that doesn’t stop them from doing it anyway. “I’m from Japan.”

The camera shakes, makes everything seem more candid. “Where in Japan?”

“All models need to be finished with hair and makeup in the next two minutes,” goes the shrill of someone’s megaphoned voice in the background. Shouts, walkie-talkies, frustrated groans all around. “Two minutes everyone.”

Atsumu is back in frame. There are sectioning clips in his hair and setting powder dusting his under-eyes. “Wherever,” he says, and it’s not particularly dishonest. He is whoever from wherever, born at whenever during whatever. It doesn’t matter if he’s from Tokyo or Osaka, or some quiet prefecture no foreigner will recognize. He’s still Atsumu Miya from Japan, and that’s all he needs to be.

Not anyone or anything more.

(This is how it should go. Nobody has to know that he’s from some tiny little town in Hyogo in the same way that nobody has to know the name of his childhood imaginary friend. Unimportant information, meaningless conjecture, or any other word phrase to call it by. He’s just another country boy chasing a dream of big cities, low-end upbringings dressed in high-end glamour. A child wearing clothes sizes too big for their meager little body.

It doesn’t fit his image, and it isn’t how he’s marketed, and it isn’t something his agency ever wants people to realize—but that’s all he’s ever been.

And nobody, _nobody_ needs to know that.)

“Wherever you want me to be from,” he manages, one last thing before the camera cuts to the next model, before footage is shown of them stomping out single-file onto the catwalk. “Doesn’t really matter.”

✧

Swan Lake used to be the apex you dreamt of, remember that? The way you wished you could swim in the spotlights for all eight movements, play all the roles, show everyone your wingspan. The thirty-two fouettes aren’t for you, no, they never were, but you danced anyway. How come?

You were eight when you first saw the recording, and you were eighteen when you swore to never watch it again. Tchaikovsky makes you feel sick now whenever you hear his music, always on the cusp of lurching, but you listen anyway. How come?

They said you could never dance again, but here you are in front of an audience like it’s another one of your high school recitals. Their eyes follow you with the same scrutiny you remember from your days at the practice rooms, peering into a looking glass no matter which way you turn, but you perform anyway. How come?

It hurts you, but you stay. You stay anyway. How come?

How’d it end up like this?

✧

Osamu tells Atsumu to go grocery shopping. It's a ritualistic habit of his to text weekly, too heavy on the side of insistence, accompanied with a slew of other things he nags Atsumu to do—regularly workout, go to bed at a reasonable time, avoid drinking so much damn alcohol. People of all varieties tell him to do all assortments of things in all sorts of settings. But even so, he’s the one who gets to pick and choose when to listen.

Atsumu never goes grocery shopping. He also never does what Osamu says. His extension of agreeability moves from the outside in—strangers first, Osamu last—and Atsumu already has a list of priorities that stomp out any of Osamu’s suggestions, kick any thought of practicing one of the supposed ‘good, healthy habits’ to the curb. Atsumu has no energy to workout, sleeping by midnight was something he stopped doing in high school, and when he’s offered alcohol, who is he to say no?

But Akaashi asks Atsumu to go grocery shopping, and that’s the fundamental difference. It’s not a solicitation, or a demand, but a casual phone call Atsumu receives during his nap in an Uber. The ringtone thrums syncopated beats against the side of his thigh, and when Atsumu answers, there’s an immediate cough on the other side of the line. Akaashi’s too sick, Bokuto’s too worried and too inept to grocery shop on his own, and Atsumu’s persuaded way too easily.

He’s hungover now, in the dairy aisle of the Midtown Whole Foods, awkward grip on his half-empty shopping basket, and frankly—he fucking hates this.

There are too many kinds of cheeses. That is the first issue. There are also too many kinds of bread. That is the second. There are too many aisles, and too many items, and too many workers onlooking as he walks himself in circles around the store. He takes a glance at the list Akaashi texted him again, what seems to be a congregation of basic household foods, but with the layout of the shop, Atsumu has no method or direction of finding any of them.

After a full minute of reading the list up then down then back up again, somewhere halfway is something Atsumu can see himself personally purchasing—coffee.

It seems like a simple enough task, buying something he’s already familiar with. He glances at the hanging signs, at the specifications beneath each aisle number, strides past the shelves of strange organic cereals and items marked gluten-free that shouldn’t have gluten in them to begin with, before he reaches the coffee aisle. A large, intimidating thing with way too many kinds for Atsumu to ever learn the differences of.

Atsumu drinks tons of coffee, don’t get him wrong, from the americanos to the expressos to the ristrettos. He isn’t picky about where he gets it from, whether it be some pretentious café next to a corner store in Queens or the McDonalds in Tokyo Station. As long as it’s dark, has no cream or sugar, and it fuels him enough for his next few hours before he downs another, Atsumu’s golden. He even has the coffee maker Osamu got for him for Christmas.

But this stresses him out much more than it should, buying coffee. Akaashi wants two in particular: Colombia La Palmera and Guatemala Palo Blanco, organic. Atsumu does not know where to start. The different blends and roasts and brands all together—there must be several dozen of them. A hundred of them, even. To him, there may as well be a thousand.

For some reason, it makes him feel sick. His stomach turns at the sight of so much of it, so much coffee, so much _food_ all around him. There’s a reason why Atsumu avoided this sort of place, these shelved hellscapes of ingredients and calories and serving sizes. He hates those fucking nutrition labels, hates that there’s an itch that makes him look, hates the voice that tells him to care. They’re at the back of each package. All of them. Every last one.

Atsumu steps away. He has to. The coffee aisle feels less of an open space and more like a room that walls him in. But when he walks out, turns the corner, there’s more food in front of him. More shelves. More aisles. There are the cereals again, and then soups, and then the rest of the canned goods. There are pasta boxes and bags of rice and a bakery’s worth of bread. Another turn and there’s the actual bakery with cakes and donuts. Past that is the produce section with vegetables so perfect they seem plastic. There are windows, but Atsumu cannot find the door.

It all reminds him of the wrong things. The cashiers at the registers glance up at him from their monitors, scanning away barcodes and typing away UPCs. Atsumu’s used to being watched wherever he goes, the streets and the fitting rooms and the runways, but there’s something about it now, the way the other people in line turn to him as they hear the heels of his shoes click against the floor. There’s something about being stared at while carrying a basket of food, in a place full of food, looking at nothing but arrangements of food. Something that does not sit well with Atsumu at all.

It’s too much. Way too much.

And he just wants to drop everything right then and there, leave his basket in the middle of an aisle for someone to kick out of the way later, toss the avocados and the bell peppers and the three packages of different expensive cheeses over his shoulder and forget about them altogether. The grocery store is not a safe space. No place in New York City is a safe space. There is no place of refuge. There is no recess to sequester himself into, no area for him to stop and just breathe, knees tucked to chest and arms tucked to thigh. He is trapped in an open cell. Atsumu does not know where the bathroom is, and that’s the only place he can look to go.

But he still doesn’t walk out. Not when Akaashi is sick, and Bokuto is worried, and he is being relied on.

This is not a display of strength. This is not a display of fortitude either. Atsumu could leave and say he couldn’t do it from the start. Or better yet, he could’ve declined to begin with. He could be at home. He could be sleeping before his flight to London tomorrow. He could save himself the anxiety.

But he’s just a people pleaser like that. He never quite learned how to say no, never quite learned to put himself first. Atsumu knows better, knows what and when and how he should act in self-benefit. But when it comes to being favored, being liked, rarely is there hesitation. That’s just how he is. That’s the person he’s come to be. Instead of sparing himself the effort, or the discomfort, or the apprehension—he is standing on both brittle legs in a Whole Foods. The one in Midtown with the most insufferable customer base on this side of the planet. He’s at the front of the store where eyes are on him all over, surrounded by neat arrangements of bags and boxes and glossy, pretty packaging, stomach doing tour jetés and nerves doing cabrioles—and he’s supposed to be grocery shopping.

Atsumu makes it to checkout eventually, the wait an eternity too long. Only half of the items on Akaashi’s list are in his basket. The bare bones of a palpable meal is all they are, and certain ingredients have no utility without others, but none of that matters. It's fine. It’s enough, because later, he’ll say something urgent came up. He’ll pretend his heart wasn’t thudding beats too fast and his palms weren’t sweating. He’ll feign nonchalance. He does it all the time.

As the cashier rings him up, Atsumu manages eye contact. Gives her a smile, still, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. As if his fingernails haven’t been bitten all the way down.

The door slides open too slow on his way out.

✧

[FROM: _samu samu_ ]

[8:42] hey tsumu  
[8:42] i think it’s best if you start going to therapy again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wahh!!! and here is the first part of the most stressful thing i've ever written!! oh man!! there's not too much sakusa, i know, but this is all just expository stuff so far! we'll get more into him later, since atsumu is a Character and a Half and i must build him with adequate brick and mortar. there's so, so much more of this story to go, but here's to exciting (maybe?) beginnings!
> 
> \- - -
> 
> if you would like to cheer me on or scream at me, feel free to do so on [twitter](https://twitter.com/FAIRSTRlFE)!


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